ARTICLES ABOUT PROTEASE BY DATE - PAGE 3

`This is a recording. When we have something to announce, we'll announce it. Until then, we have nothing to say.' -- Chicago Bulls General Manager Jerry Krause, not answering questions Monday about contract talks with Dennis Rodman, stalled only days before training camp begins Friday. PRIME MINISTER LIONEL JOSPIN, DEFENDING A DEAL A FRENCH OIL COMPANY SIGNED OVER U.S. OBJECTIONS TO DEVELOP A NATURAL GAS FIELD IN IRAN: `American laws apply in the United States, not in France.' `We have no choice but to change.

He sold his car to pay for his funeral and a 6-by-3-foot plot at the local cemetery. He lay in his bed in his Boulder, Colo., home surrounded by hospice caregivers and loved ones who had said their last goodbyes. At 33, David Whitesel had succumbed. The virus had won. "It's a real powerful experience to have accepted death. I am not the same person today," says Whitesel, who contracted the HIV virus in 1984. After he developed AIDS, a number of other infections invaded his body.

President Clinton invoked the legacy of John F. Kennedy's 1960s race to the moon Sunday and set a national target of developing an AIDS vaccine within the next 10 years. "We dare not be complacent" in meeting the challenge of HIV, the AIDS virus, Clinton said in announcing creation of a research center at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., to complete the task. Up to 50 researchers drawn from existing NIH programs will staff the suburban Washington center, and no new money was earmarked.

An entire class of powerful, new AIDS-fighting drugs will become available to many Illinoisans through a dramatic increase in state subsidies this week. The state will help pay for all four of the new protease inhibitor drugs for about 1,550 people with AIDS and the AIDS virus. Use of the four drugs has been shown to greatly improve the health of AIDS and HIV-positive patients. Previously, the state helped patients pay for just one of the inhibitors. But it is use of the drugs in combination, or a "cocktail" mixture, that has shown promising signs of allowing patients to live longer.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday for the first time gave the green light to use HIV protease inhibitors, the powerful new class of AIDS drug, in the treatment of children. The FDA approved the use of North Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories' Norvir to treat AIDS-infected children ages 2 to 13. At the same time, it approved the use of Viracept, made by La Jolla, Calif.-based Agouron Pharmaceutical Inc., in the treatment of adults and children. The action won the applause of the Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

If Abbott Laboratories were looking for an ardent spokesman to tout its AIDS drug, Dr. Andrew M. Pavlatos would fit the bill. Abbott's Norvir, he decrees, "decreases the viral load better than all other protease inhibitors," the new class of AIDS drugs that is renewing hope in the battle against the deadly disease. Using Norvir in combination with another protease inhibitor and other AIDS drugs, Pavlatos says he has seen "a large number come back from the dead . . . who have gone off disability and back to productive work."

GARLIC: According to some new evidence, garlic may help ward off lung cancer. Penn State researchers say there's a compound in garlic--diallyl trisulfide-- that helped keep human lung-tumor cells from growing. ELDERBERRIES: New research indicates that elderberries thwart the flu virus in two ways: Proteins in the fruit block spikes of hemagglutinin (what a virus uses to puncture and infect a healthy cell), while anthocyanins (the fruit's pigment) turn off an enzyme the invader uses to eat its way through cell membranes.

By John H. Stroger Jr., President, Board of Commissioners of Cook County | December 21, 1996

Your Dec. 4 article "AIDS patients finding welfare part of treatment" (Metro) makes an eloquent case for Illinois to save lives while saving money through a $10 million supplemental appropriation for the AIDS Drugs Reimbursement Program (ADRP). ADRP provides drugs to low-income people living with HIV who are not covered by Medicaid or private insurance in Illinois. Funded by federal and state monies, ADRP has provided thousands of Illinoisans with potentially life-saving drugs.

AIDS drugs approved in Europe: The European Commission has approved two AIDS-fighting drugs for sale in the 15-member European Union. The drugs are Crixivan, produced by Merck Co., and Invirase, produced by Hoffman-La Roche. The products, already on the market in the U.S., are known as "protease inhibitors" and block enzymes that are the key to replication of the AIDS virus. Approval followed a positive recommendation from the European Medicines Evaluation Agency.

Agouron to give away AIDS drug: Agouron Pharmaceuticals Inc. said today it will give away its experimental AIDS drug, Viracept, to people in an advanced stage of the disease who have exhausted other treatments. It will be offered to people who have stopped using three commercially available protease inhibitors because of adverse reactions, intolerable side effects or because they haven't worked. The drug is being made available to people for whom no other comparable or satisfactory therapy exists.